The Role A Citizen Plays In Government

2 Pages 531 Words

Essay Two

The ultimate role a citizen plays in the United States government is the engagement in politics by voting, organizing, and criticizing leaders that he or she does not believe serve them justly. The works of Rousseau, Thoreau, and Jefferson substantiate this assumption by providing intellectual and literary theories about the function of a citizen. Also, the statements that the authors make, though they differ from one another, provide reinforcement to this concept.
The first substantial writer mentioned is Rousseau, who in writing “The Origins of Civil Society,” conveys his belief that government has taken the natural freedoms of man and has replaced it with a more materialistic liberty. Also, in his book, Rousseau describes a term called “social compact” that a people share with one another to strengthen the community (65). These suppositions all support the fluent author’s theory of a strong government by a mutual agreement between the people, but his most potent statement comes from his description of “The Sovereign People.” Rousseau states that the Sovereign People “share a collective name of The People, the individuals who compose it are known as citizens” ( 67). The reader, upon noting the author’s rhetoric, understands the power that Rousseau believed citizens had in a Democratic government.
Although influenced by Rousseau, the great American founder Thomas Jefferson expands the latter author’s ideas into one of our most treasured documents, the “Declaration of Independence.” In the “Declaration of Independence,” Jefferson addresses the justifications of seceding from the British empire, and laid structure to the conjecture when a government abuses its citizens, it is the direct responsibility of the people to right what has been wronged or overthrow the governing entity entirely. With the belief that every man is free and have the rights of “life, liberty, and pursuit of...